Illegal Aliens Protest Firing

The Washington Post reported last week that about two dozen D.C. workers who were fired by Chipotle for not having the proper immigration documents gathered to protest their terminations.

Forty workers, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants, were terminated March 9 after the chain conducted a review of two D.C. restaurants and found that some workers could not prove their immigration status.

“We found that these workers were not legally authorized to work in this country,” said Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold. “Many workers left immediately, but we had to let others go because we can’t employ them under the law because they are not legally authorized to work in the United States.”

There is nothing particularly unusual about protesting being fired but what’s interesting about this protest was that it was more focused on the manner in which they were fired rather than the reason for the firings.

The disgruntled former employees didn’t want to discuss their immigration status with the Post but instead focused their complaints about what they felt was the lack of respect by the chain when they were fired.

“We’ve dedicated so much time to Chipotle, and for them to fire us all of a sudden, and in this way, made us feel terrible,” Yeny Portales, one of the fired workers, wrote in statement. “We felt like they didn’t value our years of service and that we, as their employees, didn’t matter to them.”

Let’s see they knew they were illegal and therefore working illegally and they think they deserve to be treated as if they were legal when being fired?

All the stores did was take the employees into a back room and terminate them which isn’t really all that different than what happens in corporate America where an employee is called into an office and fired and the escorted out of the building. That’s probably a lot more humiliating than being fired by a fast food restaurant.

This is just another example of the fact that we have become a nation on entitlements and in this case those entitlements apparently extend to illegal immigrants or at least they think they should.